FW: OWL guide note?

All,
 
A note from one our engineers.
 
charles

-----Original Message-----
From: Rob Shearer 
Sent: 22 August 2003 07:46
To: Jack Berkowitz; Engineering; Paul Turner; Matthew Quinlan
Subject: RE: OWL guide note?


My main concern is not in what the file extension is, but that in making
the change from .owl to .rdf the authors of the OWL Guide have tried to
hedge their bets and try going without any extension at all. The
"imports" statements in the ontologies now reference a URLs that do not
include *any* extensions.
 
However, the Guide continues to reference the food and wine files *with*
an extension, now ".rdf". So if we load "wine.rdf", it imports "food",
which in turn imports "wine", a completely *different* URL. They've
added xml:base attributes such that the new statements from "wine"
should be exact duplicates of everything in "wine.rdf", but the fact
that we're now dealing with three files instead of two just seems silly.
 
Much worse, this "two URLs for the wine file" thing is a huge pain to
configure. Maybe the W3C server guys managed to set up two URLs for the
same file, and made sure that the MIME type mapping for the file without
an extension must be RDF (since the server can no longer automatically
infer it from the extension), but are server admins going to want to go
through such shenanigans for every ontology they publish? And if you
want to load an ontology not from a web server but from a local file
this sequence gets even worse, particular on filesystems which don't
allow symbolic links (which, incidentally, are exactly those file
systems on which extensions are most important). How will Cerebra be
able to load the food and wine ontologies from local files on a Windows
machine?
 
Getting these ".rdf" extensions back into the "imports" lines is
probably by far the easiest solution.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jack Berkowitz 
Sent: 22 August 2003 15:32
Subject: FW: OWL guide note?


Ugh...

At 3:10 PM +0100 8/22/03, Jack Berkowitz wrote:
>Guys,
>
>congratulations on the CR!
>
>One thing though. We note with interest the following change note on
>the OWL Guide Appendix D
>
>*      Modifed ontologies. Changed extension from ".owl" to ".rdf"
>(since we did not register the owl MIME type).
>
>Now, I have not done anything to investigate this in the mailgroup
>logs or anywhere else, but please tell me that this is getting
>resolved so that we have .owl for the end of ontologies??
>
>thanks,
>
>Jack